4 Psychology Tricks to Hack Your Happiness
If someone asked you what you could do to enjoy your life more, to get more pleasure, what would you think of? Well, maybe you’ll think about going to your favorite concert or going traveling or maybe eating at expensive restaurants. But the crazy thing is that we can get so much more enjoyment out of what we already have. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t seek out novelty and new experiences. You can do that, too. But you can also get far more enjoyment out
Of the things you’re already doing. Perhaps enjoying them twice as much as you do now. So today, I’m going to show you how to get even more enjoyment out of the things that you already enjoy without always needing to find external new sources of enjoyment. You may have heard of the hydonic treadmill. It’s the idea that when positive or negative life events happen to us, they change how we feel for a while, but eventually we go
Back to our baseline. Now, while this isn’t always the case, it is often true that we tend to get used to things, whether good or bad. Suppose, for instance, that you renovated your living room. At first, you’re really excited about the way it looks. Every time you’re in that room, you feel especially good. But after a little while, you get used to it. You stop even noticing it. And eventually, you’re no happier with that living room than you were with your
Old one. After a number of years, you might even be eyeing a new design for your living room. A funny thing about the Hyonic treadmill, though, is that it doesn’t always happen. Take for instance eating at your favorite restaurant once every 3 months. While the first time you go there might be the most exciting, you could still get lots of pleasure going there every 3 months and never have it lose its novelty. On the other hand, if
You were to eat there every night, then yeah, it would become less enjoyable. So, what’s the difference between the renovated living room that you get a lot of enjoyment from at first, but then you get used to and it stops giving you benefits and the dinner at your favorite restaurant every 3 months where you get a similar amount of enjoyment every single time you go. Well, there’s two big differences. The first is framing. If you think about that routine of going
To your favorite restaurant every 3 months, before that day, you’re going to be looking forward to it. And when you go, you’re going to know I’m not going to be here again for three months. So, it’s special every time. Additionally, three months is a long enough gap that it can still feel somewhat novel. If we were eating the same food every day, we would get used to it, and our desire for novelty and our body’s need for
Diversification of nutrition would start to win out. Compare this to the renovated living room. At first, it’s new and different. We’re framing it as something exciting. But after a little while, it’s no longer the new living room. It’s just our living room. We’re used to being there and we stop thinking of it as an exciting thing. The second big difference is attention. When you’re going to that favorite restaurant every 3 months, you’re going to be really
Focused on the experience, reviewing the menu, thinking about what you want to eat, and when the food finally arrives, you’re going to be savoring those first bites and really enjoying them. In other words, you’re going to be paying a great deal of attention to that pleasurable experience. But what about the living room renovation? Yes, at first you’re going to be paying tremendous attention to it. You’re going to be noticing numerous ways that it differs from your
Previous living room. But as time goes on, you’re very likely to pay it less and less attention. And as your attention fades, you’re going to enjoy it less and less. This is one reason why people often don’t get as much benefit as they thought from purchases they make. Yes, as soon as they bought that new pair of shoes, they felt really good, but then they stopped paying attention to those shoes and they no longer got the benefit. Then they’re on
To buy the next thing. Unfortunately, all of this can happen with the people we love as well. When you first start dating your partner, you’re going to pay a lot of attention to them. You’re going to frame it as this new exciting thing. After 20 years of marriage, it’s easy to just get used to having them around, to pay much less attention to them and their positive qualities, not reminding yourself that you have this wonderful person in your life because you’re
Simply so used to it. It’s just normal for you now. So, let’s get into it. How concretely can we get a lot more enjoyment from the things in our life that are already good? Now, I’m not talking here about making the best of bad situations in your life or getting more from neutral things. I’m talking about getting a lot more enjoyment out of the things in your life that are already good, even if they’re very simple, easy things like the enjoyment
Of walking outside or the enjoyment of your morning cup of coffee. Remember that we said the framing for an experience matters a lot for our enjoyment. At first, you frame your living room as new and exciting and then you just frame it as that’s just my living room. We can use this idea to our advantage with the first technique, which is gratitude. We can take the thing that we’re enjoying and we can think about it differently so that we
Appreciate it more. One way to do this is to play a simple game. Imagine you’re experiencing the thing for the first time again. So, for instance, if you’re drinking your morning cup of tea, you can approach it with new eyes, thinking, “What would it be like if I’ve never had tea before?” With those new eyes, you can notice the spiral of steam coming off of it. You can notice the floral scent that you hadn’t really paid
Attention to. Seeing the experience as though it’s the first time lets you see it through new eyes and appreciate it all over again. The second trick is to imagine that you’re never going to have that experience again. Suppose this was your last time ever having your morning cup of tea. You’re going to try to memorize that experience, catch every little detail, and you’re going to enjoy it so much more because of that. And this is not such a crazy idea because as
Mortals, we all will have a last time doing everything that we enjoy. There will be our last time drinking a cup of tea. And for many of us, we won’t know when that last time is. The final gratitude technique is to imagine that you didn’t have this thing. Think about the fact that not everyone can have this experience. Or think about the fact that hundreds of years ago, people would have had to travel huge distances to have
This experience. Once you keep in mind the possibility of not having the thing, then having the thing becomes so much greater. So, we’ve covered the first technique, gratitude. Let’s go on to the next one, presence. Suppose you do have a routine of going to your favorite restaurant every 3 months. Chances are you’ll really enjoy those first few bites of the meal, but by the 10th bite or the 20th bite or the 30th bite, you might actually be thinking about
Something else. Maybe you’ll be thinking about what you have to do at work tomorrow, or maybe you’ll be distracted by something else in the restaurant. We can boost our enjoyment substantially by simply having more presence, trying to bring our complete interested attention towards whatever it is we’re doing. Concretely, this might mean putting your phone away in your pocket, focusing on your food, not thinking about work, and when you do become distracted, which is pretty likely to happen, no problem.
Just note that you’re distracted and return your complete focus to whatever it is you’re doing. This brings us to our third technique, which is focus. Assuming you now have your full attention on what you’re doing, you can now focus on the most enjoyable aspects of the experience. So, for instance, at the restaurant, instead of focusing on the entire table and what’s around you and all of the food at once, you can focus specifically on the delicious
Flavor in your mouth. You can even go further and say, “Is there a part of my mouth where the experience is even more delicious, and can I focus on that?” Very often, even within a pleasurable experience, there’ll be little parts of it that are even better than the rest, and you can keep narrowing your focus to get at the better and better parts. Slowing down can help, too. If you’re rushing through the experience or eating quickly in this case, you’re much less
Likely to be able to focus on the very best parts. This brings us to the final technique, acceptance. This one is very powerful, but it’s also subtle and hard to explain, so bear with me. The idea is to stop resisting everything that’s imperfect about the present moment. Let the present moment be exactly as it is without wanting anything to be different about it. What do I mean by that, though? Well, if you’re having a pleasurable experience or any
Experience, there’s ways in which it will feel imperfect. If you pay really close attention to exactly what you want in this moment and what you don’t like about it, you’ll probably notice some things. Maybe there’s a little too much pressure in your shoe right now. Maybe you have an itch on your face. Maybe the food isn’t quite salty enough. Even if you’re not focusing on these imperfections, they can still interfere with your enjoyment. The fact that you
Want things to be different makes the experience slightly worse than it otherwise could be. So the idea of the acceptance technique is to try to let go to remove all resistance to anything about the present moment to have no resistance even to the imperfections and to actually want the imperfections to be exactly the way they are. So this moment can be precisely what it is. A little game I use that helps me get in the right mindset is I think of myself as
Trying to capture these moments from my experience exactly as they are. as though I’m making a collection of memories and I want to capture them exactly as they are in that second, not alter them to be something different. Suppose I wanted to practice these techniques with voodoo here to get even more enjoyment out of my experience with her. First, I lean into gratitude. I could think back to the time when I met Voodoo when a woman who had way too many
Cats said that we could come over and see if there’s one there that was a good fit for us. And as soon as I came in, Voodoo came up to me, immediately demanded pets, and I simply petted her for 20 minutes. And I think about that moment because that could have never happened. We could have ended up without voodoo and that makes me appreciate her all that much more. Then there’s the second technique, presence. When I’m
With her, it’s so easy to be doing something else. I could be listening to an audio book. I could be scrolling on my phone. But I enjoy the time with her so much more if I try to maintain presence and really be there with her at that moment. And then there’s the third technique, focus. I cannot just pay attention to the experience as a whole, but focus on particularly enjoyable aspects of it. I can focus on the
Feeling of her silky coat as I stroke her. I can focus on her cute panther-like face and nose by focusing on the particularly enjoyable details. It makes experience even better. And finally, there’s technique four, acceptance. Trying to remove any resistance I have to the present moment. Maybe she’s lying on me and I’m getting uncomfortable in that position. Or maybe she’s trying to bite my phone and getting slobber on it. By accepting these imperfections, not as imperfections, but just as what this
Moment is. So, what’s the point of all this? is that you can get a lot more enjoyment out of the things that you’re already experiencing in your life. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t seek out novelty and new experiences. You can do that, too. But you can also enhance your everyday experiences, the good things you already have, perhaps getting twice as much pleasure from them than you do now. If you want to learn more about how
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